May 2009 Progress Report

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on May 29, 2009

Spring 2009 hit us like a rock, I have been so busy it has been hard to set aside time to write about our recent progress, but here is a quick overview of areas where some significant developments have been achieved.

First, we were able to secure partnerships with organizations that will take our food and agriculture systems development to a whole new level. This partnerships include the Agriculture Research and Utilization Institute, the Cooperative Development Services, the North Country Development Fund, and a large contingent of allies and operational partners such as Agstar Financial Services, the Biobusiness Alliance of MN and many individual businesses, executives and especially farmers in our region who support the projects that make up the Rural Enterprise Center.

One area of development that is now completed is the training of a manager operator and the launching of a grain processing and distribution system. We now have completed securing equipment (some borrowed from farmers, some purchased used, and so on), trained an operator and stocked 250,000 lbs of different organic grains and supplements to ensure a reliable feed supply to grow into the next level of poultry production in the Northfield area economic cluster (32 acres of poultry production, 450 acres of grain production and fully supporting one poultry processing facility) under development.

We also added capacity to grow 2,000 more birds to existing infrastructure and installed the pilot test for a fully outdoors automatic watering and feeding system, making our first one acre production unit fully operational. Currently, we are working on setting up two new sites and have started the training process to ensure that once the sites are fully equipped that there will be two families ready to operate them, their involvement in setting up the system is a key part of their training as it is expected that they will mentor new farmers in the coming years.

Our current grain processing should be able to support up to four families producing poultry on 32 acres for a total between 105,000 to 150,000 birds and between 450 and 500 acres of small grain production. This cluster of farmers will also support up to 20 acres of vegetable production, in preparation for this related farming enterprises, we have started the training of a value added vegetable processing operation in partnership with a local school with a certified commercial kitchen. Although the goal of deploying this cluster will take a couple of years to achieve with recruitment and training of families as the bottleneck of the process, once this first cluster is fully deployed, our ability to train other families will also increases exponentially, especially if our plan to launch an Agripreneur Training Center materializes in the coming year. This training facility will handle 12 specialized farming enterprise opportunities, each targeting a specific market opportunity in the food and agriculture marketplace.

A huge step forward in building a scalable food and agriculture system under the  leadership of Latino families is that we have been able to establish key partnerships with established farmers, and have a large numbers of them on the partnership line-up seriously committed to taking land out of current production and shifting it to our system beginning this fall.

Another big sign of progress is that we were able to set-up 105 community garden plots which have served in the past as a screening mechanism to identify serious farmers within the Northfield community. Having identified community gardens as a strategic component of our system, we have started working with Red Wing’s community garden and helped organize a large contingent of Latino families in Dodge City to get another community garden launched there under local leadership. We were also blessed with the presence of Katie Blanchard, a student at Carleton College who is now the coordinator of the Northfield community garden.  This extra support has allowed us to tend to other communities and businesses farther away from our center of operations in Northfield who had requested our assistance in the past.

Aside from the “on the ground” work, we also trained restaurant owners on business management and participated in opening a new site for Plaza Morena Mexican Restaurants in Madelia, MN.

Here is a slide show with more pictures reflecting results from our business training program, business support area (supporting the process for new business to get started) and some photos from our poultry production system including our efforts to establish heritage breeds as a critical and competitive part of re-generating our regional food systems in a sustainable way.

Part of the process of re-engaging natural food systems includes growing conventional commercial breeds under new systems where birds roam freely and green pastures are available as a food supplement and to improve their health and their immunological resistance to deceases. Growing poultry outdoors is a very important step in growing high quality poultry meat which is fundamentally based on the quality and health of the birds themselves. This is something that CANNOT be achieved in confinement or factory livestock farming. Our Latino heritage, assets, traditions, culture and knowledge in poultry production that we bring from Latin America becomes one of the most precious assets for getting people out of poverty while building a sustainable food system that grows in diversity of production as more families become involved. Our end goal is to derive an attractive return on investment for asset rick Latino families who currently live in economic poverty and by doing so, engage them in a new way of thinking about their role in this country, their contributions to this economy and the future of their children which includes their education, civic engagement and gaining the respect that we deserve as net contributors to our rural communities.